The liturgy office of the Bishops of England and Wales has praised the International Committee for English (ICEL) for its preference for the use of inclusive language in the 'green book' new English Mass translation draft currently circulating among bishops in English-speaking countries.

Other comments released in a statement on Friday include a recommendation to avoid unnecessary archaisms, and to pay more attention to questions of sentence length and syntactical constructions.

The draft has been with Bishops for some time, but its leaking to ABC Radio's Religion Report last week, and subsequent publication on the ABC website, made it widely available.

The 'green book' is issued to enable a preliminary consultation of all Bishops in the English-speaking Conferences on the basic proposals of ICEL, before ICEL produces its final text, in a 'grey book', which it recommends for use by Bishops' Conferences in English-speaking countries around the world.